The Garland Dance was performed on Tuesday evening for the opening night of NYCB performances at SPAC in Saratoga Springs. Local children performed with the company for the evening.Photo Erica Miller 7/9/13 news_NYCBopens3_Wed

SARATOGA SPRINGS -- The New York City Ballet opened its 48th season at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center Tuesday night with five ballets holding a friendly contest between classical and modern styles. No competition could have looked happier.

The fun starts when Angle begins partnering Mearns in the middle movement -- she adopts his bird-of-prey gestures and literally lets her hair down -- then explodes in the witty finale, with Fairchild stamping hectic circles around the bewildered Stafford. She flutters hands in his face, he swings her about with her feet defiantly flexed, and she finally clambers up his back and somersaults over his head.

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Then NYCB added a strong new entry to its own modernist tradition, the Saratoga premiere of young Justin Peck's absorbing "Year of the Rabbit," for six soloists and a corps of 12. Peck's sunny ballet uses fine dance music by Sufyan Stevens. Arranged by Michael P. Atkinson, it offers rhythmic and melodic variety, with hints of Ravel, Hindemith and Ives enriching its recursive minimalism.

Ashley Bouder and Joaquin De Luz both dance spirited solos in counterpoint with the corps, who sometimes behave as a single large organism. Robert Fairchild and Teresa Reichlen's two duets involve graceful lifts and side-by-side dancing that slips in and out of phase. The climactic pas de deux for Janie Taylor and Tyler Angle, which unfolds to atmospheric, pulseless music, looks haunting, like a dance underwater. Peck invents striking yet elegant partnering and lifts. He makes dancers look beautiful while harnessing their speed and athleticism to his complex vision.

Two of the three purely classical works, all George Balanchine ballets to Tschaikovsky, were brief but delightful, like this summer's too-brief one-week season. In Balanchine's 1981 "Garland Dance" from "Sleeping Beauty," a cast of 56 all waltz together. Sixteen girls from local dance schools join 16 peasant couples and eight gentlewomen in creating an intricate vision of an ordered society, interweaving its patterns in celebration.

Bouder joined Gonzalo Garcia for nine brilliant minutes in "Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux," Balanchine's 1960 dazzler. Bouder uses her thrillingly precise technique expressively, sustaining an arabesque on pointe longer than the music suggests, then catching up like lightning. Her hands stab the air, then lilt lyrically; she is a diamond with a heart.

The opening adagio ends with Gonzalo partnering Bouder in penché, plunging her downward. Then--surprise!--she lifts her supporting leg and floats above the ground in his arms. This "fish" pose anticipates the finale, a whirlwind competition between the two, culminating in Bouder's two fish dives into Gonzalo's arms, before he carries her off, soaring overhead.

The concluding Balanchine/Tschaikovsky classic, the 1947 "Theme and Variations," shows Tiler Peck and Andrew Veyette in top form and at top speed. Veyette's vertical jumps and bravura turns, and Peck's sparkling leaps and pirouettes earn them the privilege of leading the company in the finale's majestic grand polonaise.

Opening night's ballets might provoke debate between ballet and modern dance fans, but there's no debate about NYCB. They are indispensible.

Performances of the New York City Ballet continue through July 13 at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. For tickets, call the SPAC Box Office, (518) 584-9330.